Spatial succession modeling of biological communities: a multi-model approach

Strong spatial correlation may exist in the spatial succession of biological communities, and the spatial succession can be mathematically described. It was confirmed by our study on spatial succession of both plant and arthropod communities along a linear transect of natural grassland. Both auto-correlation and cross-correlation analyses revealed that the succession of plant and arthropod communities exhibited a significant spatial correlation, and the spatial correlation for plant community succession was stronger than arthropod community succession. Theoretically it should be reasonable to infer a site's community composition from the last site in the linear transect. An artificial neural network for state space modeling (ANNSSM) was developed in present study. An algorithm (i.e., Importance Detection Method (IDM)) for determining the relative importance of input variables was proposed. The relative importance for plant families Gramineae, Compositae and Leguminosae, and arthropod orders Homoptera, Diptera and Orthoptera, were detected and analyzed using IDM. ANNSSM performed better than multivariate linear regression and ordinary differential equation, while ordinary differential equation exhibited the worst performance in the simulation and prediction of spatial succession of biological communities. A state transition probability model (STPM) was proposed to simulate the state transition process of biological communities. STPM performed better than multinomial logistic regression in the state transition modeling. We suggested a novel multi-model framework, i.e., the joint use of ANNSSM and STPM, to predict the spatial succession of biological communities. In this framework, ANNSSM and STPM can be separately used to simulate the continuous and discrete dynamics.